Project Description
stack of letter size paper with text, document holder, 2008
(installation view at Metro Poles: Art in Action, Bronx River Art Center, New York)
Below is an email that I sent to the curators and the 20 artists taking part in this show.
Dear fellow artists in Metro Poles: Art in Action,
I write to you with the hope that you would like to participate in a project I want to show at Metro Poles: Art in Action at BRAC. The title of this project is Project Description. What I hope you will contribute with is a short project description of the project that you are showing at BRAC. If your project is in collaboration with other artists in the show, I still ask you to send one project description each. I will use your texts only for the purpose described here. These 20 project descriptions that I hope to receive will be “deconstructed” into 20 new project descriptions by taking one sentence each from your individual descriptions and putting them together into new texts. I will print these “new” project descriptions on regular letter size paper with the BRAC logo and place them in an ordinary magazine holder attached close to the entrance of the space, resembling a conventional press release or exhibition text. I hope visitors will read one of these project descriptions when looking at the show. The project points to the difficulty that often arises when utopian ideas of collaboration and participation are to be carried out practically, and is in its methodology also an investigation of the possibility of participation. At the same time I hope the project will work enabling and show the potential in collaborative projects even if “the work” only exist as a project description and will have to be further developed in the imagination of the person reading this text. Of course, the exhibition in itself can also be understood as “the work” the project descriptions refer to. Thank you for taking time to read this email when I know many of you are busy with installing your own works. I really hope you would like to participate in this project and hope to hear from you very soon. Best of luck with your own projects at BRAC.
Many thanks, Åsa Elzén
PS. This text is also one of the project descriptions to be used as described above.
read the 17 versions of the Project Description
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below: one version of the Project Description
